


At The Midnight Hour, Part IV: Consanguineous

by translorastyrell (nerddowell)



Series: At The Midnight Hour (Vampire AU) [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: (so the mentioned character death is kind of an un-death), Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Human/Vampire Relationship, M/M, Vampire Turning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 21:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16710412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/translorastyrell
Summary: ‘Stay with me,’ he pleads, sitting the boy up in bed and grasping his hands tight. ‘Promise me.’‘You know I will,’ Renly smiles, relieved. ‘Is that all?’‘Staywith me, sweet one,’ he repeats. ‘Don’t ever go. Let me keep you.’Another sequel to/the finale ofAt The Midnight Hour.





	At The Midnight Hour, Part IV: Consanguineous

She is as beautiful in the dream as she was in waking. Long, dark hair loosely braided back off her face, sparkling dark eyes fringed with thick lashes, her generous mouth, the dimple in her right cheek that he shared. She is standing on the roof of their childhood home, looking out at the bay, and her children playing at her feet. Aegon, at five, is building towers of blocks for Rhaenys to knock over; the baby’s laughter is like silver bells in his ears, and Elia smiles down at them.

Oberyn sees nothing except their silver hair, their indigo eyes, their father peering up at him from the faces of his niece and nephew. Their father, dead not long before his wife and children, the cause of all this lingering pain.

Around her stand many others, women and children; some whom he recognises, others he does not. An old woman, her face wrinkled and pitted with age, sits watching the children play, a fond smile on her lips. She clutches the top of a walking cane with beringed fingers, chunks of amber and ruby and other gemstones adorning every knuckle. Behind her stand four more women, handsome though even the youngest is beginning to turn grey at the temples, the way he once did. He approaches the seated woman to ask for her name, a familiarity about her that he cannot place, and when she turns to him - her eyes grown filmy, her cheeks hollowed - he recognises her with a start.

Ellaria is gone ninety. Behind her, their daughters - Elia, named for his sister and older now than she ever will be, straight-backed and staring out to sea with his own black gaze; Obella, bespectacled now and with her hand upon her mother’s shoulder; Dorea, her hair restrained by a messy bun and as martial as ever, knife at her waist; and Loreza, his sweet Loreza, six years old the last time he had seen her, now a woman grown and as beautiful as her mother. He wants to weep.

* * *

He wakes with a start to a warm body against his own, the boy’s face relaxed in sleep, though he makes a small sound of protest and rolls over to press himself back against Oberyn’s cold, hard flesh. The women in his lover’s dream are words and wind to him, nothing to worry about; only Oberyn is tortured by the passage of time, the slow and inexorable leaving-behinds of the deaths of those he loves. Even looking down at Renly - twenty-three and fresh-faced as the dawn - he can visualise the silver beginning to creep in at his temples, the thick black locks receding further and further back across his skull, the puppyish roundness leaving his cheeks and the withering of his body to ash and dust. All whilst Oberyn remains the same, as cool and static as a marble statue.

He swore to himself he would never curse another as he himself is cursed, would never steal something so precious from anyone. Had he known what life - if one can call what he has now, life - would be like, would he have gone to it willingly? Never. But the choice was never given to him.

He longs to do it. To have something, some small fraction of the multitudes to whom he has given his heart, to stay with him. Call it selfish, because it is; call it selfish and irresponsible and cruel, because it is, but his heart aches looking at this sleeping boy and already seeing death creep towards him, hourglass in hand. Death is the rule for all mortals; but Oberyn has never been one for following rules.

He shakes Renly awake, and the boy smiles sleepily as his eyes blink open - as blue as the sea in that hazy, half-remembered dream - and he reaches for Oberyn, warm and pink against him. Oberyn bows his head, wrapping an arm around the boy’s back and lifting him up to his mouth; he kisses him, feverish, and Renly - mistaking his intent - sighs, a hand creeping down the planes of his chest to fondle his cock.

‘No,’ Oberyn tells him, almost moaning, and Renly’s hand retreats, his eyes still heavy-lidded and muddled with sleep.

‘No?’

‘Stay with me,’ he pleads, sitting the boy up in bed and grasping his hands tight. ‘Promise me.’

‘You know I will,’ Renly smiles, relieved. ‘Is that all?’

‘ _Stay_ with me, sweet one,’ he repeats. ‘Don’t ever go. Let me keep you.’

‘You already have me,’ Renly tells him, and grows worried. ‘Oberyn, what’s the matter?’

‘You don’t understand,’ he whispers, leaning down to brush his lips - dry and smooth, and hiding those teeth like knives, like the fingers of death reaching out to crumble the boy’s beating heart to dust - against the skin of his throat. ‘Let me keep you. Now and always.’

Renly stares at him for a long time before he swallows. ‘Are you asking-?’

‘Permission? No, little one.’ Oberyn shakes his head. ‘Absolution.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I am selfish enough to do it anyway.’ He scrapes his nail over the boy’s shoulder, hears the breath catch sweetly in his throat at the sharp sting, watches the blood well to the surface, a line of rubies over skin like alabaster. ‘Just let me.’

Renly nods.

Oberyn brushes his lips again over that tender spot, the skin fine as silk over the throbbing pulse, and holds Renly still as he sinks in his teeth. The boy moans at the pain even as Oberyn drinks greedily, past the point of thirst, past the point even of gluttony; he gorges himself, until the boy is as white as the bedsheet, his heart juddering in his chest, fighting to push the last drops of blood around his limp body. He lingers there, at death’s door, for long seconds as Oberyn raises his own wrist to his mouth, chin stained crimson, and tears at it with his teeth. He presses the wound to Renly’s lips, allows it to drip sluggishly into his mouth, and a moment later the boy is clinging to him, pressing the torn limb to his mouth and sucking the blood from his veins like a mother’s milk. A heartbeat like the roar of thunder, pounding like drums, fills his ears, mingling with another, louder and stronger, until the sound is deafening, the pain in his wrist like fire licking up his arm, and the boy’s eyes - blue as sapphires - burn on his.

When Oberyn pulls away, gasping, the boy collapses back to the bed, those feverish blue eyes falling shut. His back arches as though a string at his navel has been pulled, dragging him off the bed, limbs straightening and tensing. Oberyn strokes the hair back from his face, feels the boy’s skin burning beneath his palm, the kettledrum of his heart rattling against his ribs, his death throes as painful and beautiful as his orgasms.

When his eyes open again, they are hard and clear as crystal, and Renly Baratheon, like his lover, is as dead as a doornail.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you have all enjoyed reading this AU as much as I have done writing it!


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